Self-Driving & Robotics Quarterly Report — Q1 2026

Q1 2026 marked an inflection point for the autonomous vehicle and robotics sector. Regulatory momentum accelerated after the US Senate hearing on February 4 ("Hit the Road, Mac: The Future of Self-Driving Cars"), which produced… 1. Executive Summary Q1 2026 marked an inflection point for the autonomous vehicle and robotics sector. Regulatory momentum accelerated after the US Senate hearing on February 4 ("Hit the Road, Mac: The Future of Self-Driving Cars"), which produced bipartisan signals in favour of a federal AV framework — reducing the current patchwork of 38 conflicting state regulations. NVIDIA's unveiling of the Alpamayo end-to-end AV platform at CES and its expansion at GTC (March 16–19) effectively positioned neural-stack computing as the new standard, accelerating OEM adoption timelines. Tesla confirmed its robotaxi expansion to seven additional US cities in H1 2026, and Waymo sustained its industry-leading disengagement rate of approximately 0.002 per mile across its expanding driverless fleet. In the robotics segment, end-to-end neural manipulation pipelines graduated from lab to industrial pilots, and humanoid robot funding maintained its 40%+ growth trajectory. The quarter's primary headwind was ongoing uncertainty around liability frameworks and an NHTSA working group still deliberating on minimum performance standards for L4 commercial operations. --- 2. Technical Updates — Previous Quarter (Q4 2025) 2.1 Autonomy Stack & Perception In Q4 2025, Waymo deployed the sixth generation of its Laser Bear Honeycomb lidar — a custom solid-state unit with a 360-degree field of view at 25% lower unit cost than the prior generation — to approximately 40% of its Phoenix and San Francisco fleets. Tesla rolled out FSD v12.5 to over 650,000 vehicles, extending the end-to-end neural driving architecture to highway merge and exit scenarios that previously required the legacy planner. Mobileye released its EyeQ Ultra chip to Tier-1 suppliers, achieving 176 TOPS on-device while operating within a 30W power envelope, enabling camera-only L2+ at a bill-of-materials cost below $220. Aurora's commercial trucking stack completed Q4 validation on sensor-fusion edge cases in dust and heavy rain on I-45 in Texas, ahead of its planned driverless launch. No fleet-wide critical safety failures were publicly disclosed in Q4 2025. NHTSA's Standing General Order (SGO) data for Q3 2025 (published in December) reported 27 AV-involved crashes industry-wide — none involving Waymo driverless vehicles — in a period of approximately 22 million autonomous miles driven across all filers. Performance log (Q4 2025 actuals vs. Q1 2026 targets): Metric Q4 2025 (Actual) Q1 2026 (Target) Notes -------- ----------------- ----------------- ------- Waymo disengagement rate (per mile) 0.0021 0.0018 Driverless fleet only Miles between critical intervention (Waymo) 476,000 550,000 Rolling 13-week average Object detection mAP (KITTI test set, industry composite) 74.3% 76.0% Camera-lid

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